From: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1997 15:43:02 -0800 (PST)
To: Vin McLellan <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Good Bye Cypherpunks!
Message-ID: <199702142343.PAA17507@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 3:07 PM -0500 2/14/97, Vin McLellan wrote:

>        My understanding of Sandy's effort, for instance, was that he was to
>filter out the sludge of spam and contentless name-calling with which some
>idiots were flooding the list.  My impression was that he was passing along
>any posts with content (ideas, pro or con, on almost anything) but filtering
>out the empty obscene name-calling and slurs (many of which seemed anon or
>forged, with varied and misleading titles, to duck my kill-file filters.)

Well, Vin, your understanding was flawed. Many thoughtful, "non-sludge"
posts were filtered out. Some never made it to either the "main" list nor
the "flames" list, as all posts were supposed to do.

(John Gilmore acknowledged this in his message. Anyone subscribing to only
the Flames list, as I was for a while, would see some posts not making it
to the Main list (viewable via the archive sites) nor to the Flames list.)

Even my very long and thoughtful (I think, and others have said as much)
essay on why I had been off the list for several weeks was _almost_
censored by Sandy, by his own words. Because he disliked some turn of
phrase I used in describing the ramblings of Toto, Dale Thorn, and Vulis,
he said he almost killed the entire piece, ultimately letting it through as
a "judgment call."

This is what I call a "chilling effect." Never knowing whether one's essays
will pass muster with the Chief Censor is not exactly a reason to spend a
lot of time composing a long piece.

And was my article the kind of "sludge of spam" and "countless
name-calling" you thought the Moderation experiment was all about?

And what of the four or five of my posts a week ago which never made it to
either the Main list or the Flames list? The contained no "sludge of spam"
nor "countless name-calling." What they dealt with was a claim (like this
one) that some posts were not being passed on to either of the two lists,
and that perhaps a conflict of interest was developing.

Does this still match your "understanding of Sandy's effort"?

By the way, I can forward to those who are interested these four or five
posts which got "Meta-Censored." (Unless too many people request
them...I'll promise to forward them to the first five people who request
them...then some of you can repost them to the list and see if they make it
through.)



>        By the logic of Tim and others, a clever and dedicated crusade
>against Cypherpunks by any minimally-organized group, bir or small -- your
>local coven, CoS, RC bishops, FBI, Romanian Govt, , whomever!  -- could have
>destroyed the List at any time in the past.  I'm glad they never realized
>how vulnerable we were;  I've enjoyed this Community greatly  in its current
>manifestation.

The list was not destroyed when S. Boxx/Pablo
Escobar/anon12054/Detweiler/vznuri was blasting us with dozens of messages
a day screaming that "tentacles were eating his brain" and that Cypherpunks
were out to destroy him. Believe me, for those who were there, that was a
topic of much greater daily discussion than the   insult-a-day stuff is
today.

(And yet, because journalists now frequent the CP list in greater numbers
than 2-3 years ago, at least two journalists are sniffing around for a
story on the current situation, where essentially none were very interested
in the Detweiler episode a couple of years ago, which was good. I recall
John Markoff asking me about it at Hackers, in 1993, but he didn't see it
as an especially significant story. I agree with this.)

>         I also hate to think of how gleeful the sociopaths who mail-bombed
>us into the choice of submission or suicide must be today.  I think it is a
>particularly henious crime to destroy a virtual community; something akin to
>book-burning, but maybe more like arson -- like burning village schools.
>
>    There was a willful attempt to destroy C'punks, an attack of depth and
>volume which led many of us (even those who had ignored at least three
>earlier efforts to offer filtered subsets to the List)  to welcome the
>Moderation Experiment. Unfortunately, the attempt at moderation just twisted
>our own energies against ourselves.  We were, perhaps predictably, quite
>easy to manipulate.

On this I agree with Vin. The "censorship" episodes were the predictable
outcome of such attacks, and this "psy-ops" experiment is a victory by
whoever it was who was attacking. Detweiler failed to get the list to start
censorship and "limitations of anarchic freedoms," but the current attacker
has succeeded.

--Tim May

Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside"
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1398269     | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."